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The Cellar Below the Cellar
A playfully dark folk horror inspired by the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and the mythology around Frau Perchta, set under the blazing sky of endless auroras. When a wild solar storm wipes out all electronics and traps Jane at her grandmother' s house in the woods, she is forced to start a new life off-grid as part of a small, isolated community. However, there is something very strange about her new neighbors, and the longer she lives under the eerie glow of the auroras, the more she feels her grandmother may be hiding unsettling secrets. To have any hope in her new world, Jane must find the courage to step into her power and claim her identity, but that would mean facing whatever hides in the cellar below the cellar— a place that seems to be waiting for her. Full of delightfully weird surprises and off-kilter characters, this adult coming-of-age story explores themes of female empowerment, spirituality, identity, and community. For fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Leonora Carrington.
180 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 2026
About the author
Ivy Grimes
19 books75 followersRecent author of The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion (Cemetery Gates) and Glass Stories (Grimscribe Press).
Published in The Baffler, ergot., Maudlin House, hex, and by other nice people.
Published in The Baffler, ergot., Maudlin House, hex, and by other nice people.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
March 30, 2026
We are all awaiting catastrophe. Though our minds may not accept it, we feel it in our bones: the end of our modern way of life is coming. When will it happen? How will it arrive? Will we live through it, or will we all be instantly obliterated? In Ivy Grimes’s novella, disaster comes in the form of electromagnetic solar storms that disrupt the electrical grid and drain all the batteries, instantly stripping society of its modern technological conveniences. Luckily for Grimes’s narrator Jane, though, she is visiting her grandmother in the woods at the time, so she is not trapped in the city where she lives. Grandma is a special person, though Jane is still learning exactly how special. The two squabble over typical intergenerational differences, but also over Grandma’s vague but persistent expectations for Jane, who bristles in response. They are both stubborn and contrary by nature, but it is obvious that a strong bond ties them together.
The story revolves around a small group of neighbors who share resources and offer mutual aid in the wake of the disaster. In addition, though, each household carries its own emotional baggage, which spills open and seeps into the community. Tragedy and dark secrets intermingle. While Grandma looms large, she is often in the background, tending to esoteric duties; however, the sense pervades that she knows most of what goes on and exerts influence over much of it.
With deft subtlety, Grimes weaves supernatural elements into the narrative. Inspired by Russian and Alpine folklore, she cleverly introduces threads from specific tales and pagan myths. As Jane narrates, we feel her experience of moving with one foot in contemporary ‘reality’, while her other foot struggles to find its balance in the world beyond. For Jane, like Grandma, is also special. She has a role to play in a crucial transitory process, should she choose to accept it. We all know catastrophe brings death, and the one in this book is no different. There is a lot of death, but people learn to cope, often in surprising ways. Grimes also has a knack for humor, which tempers the book’s darker themes. It’s a story that, while it seems to exist outside of time, is very much relevant to our present.
Note: Thank you to Violet Lichen Books for sending me a review copy.
The story revolves around a small group of neighbors who share resources and offer mutual aid in the wake of the disaster. In addition, though, each household carries its own emotional baggage, which spills open and seeps into the community. Tragedy and dark secrets intermingle. While Grandma looms large, she is often in the background, tending to esoteric duties; however, the sense pervades that she knows most of what goes on and exerts influence over much of it.
With deft subtlety, Grimes weaves supernatural elements into the narrative. Inspired by Russian and Alpine folklore, she cleverly introduces threads from specific tales and pagan myths. As Jane narrates, we feel her experience of moving with one foot in contemporary ‘reality’, while her other foot struggles to find its balance in the world beyond. For Jane, like Grandma, is also special. She has a role to play in a crucial transitory process, should she choose to accept it. We all know catastrophe brings death, and the one in this book is no different. There is a lot of death, but people learn to cope, often in surprising ways. Grimes also has a knack for humor, which tempers the book’s darker themes. It’s a story that, while it seems to exist outside of time, is very much relevant to our present.
Note: Thank you to Violet Lichen Books for sending me a review copy.
March 27, 2026
Ivy Grimes has released a truly phenomenal piece of writing with The Cellar Below the Cellar, creating a soft Southern Gothic apocalypse digging its fingers into the raw, rich dirt of life. A fairy tale for our fallen age, with teeth & heart to spare & great depths below the surface.
A woman adrift in life moves back in with her mysterious and spiritually sturdy grandmother in the country when a solar storm illuminates the sky and ends modernity with one great green glimmering pop. Despite this, Jane's grandmother refuses to let the collapse stop the flow of life, and wills their small community and Jane herself along by instilling survival skills, folksy wisdom and sharing her strange power that leaves all who know her feeling strangely charmed and slightly frightened.
The story progresses in stellar form as Jane and those around her struggle to adjust to the strangeness of this new reality as well as the deeper mysteries that have always laid beneath the normal, all while facing their own demons, ghosts and shadows, organic and inexplicable as they are. As those shadows and mysteries come to take center stage, they teem with mythic life I found very exciting as a reader.
So, what is this story really? Well, it's folk horror, sure, as it says on the tin. It's billed as a retelling of Vasilisa the Beautiful, and it certainly reads like a bittersweet Slavic fairy tale meets Southern Gothic Christian isolated homesteading with a 21st century end-times undercurrent. The apocalypse as we commonly envisage it is ever out of view, a tragic, massive calamity, but also just another disturbance to process and trudge through for those who continue on.
"So what if America ends?" Jane's grandmother (sort-of says, I'm paraphrasing here.) "If it does, something new will come, but there's seeds to plant and water to filter today."
One thing I greatly admire about Ivy’s work is that it always manages to be dark with a careful, unforced hand, and it also manages to be life-affirming without offering false platitudes. It’s emotionally & stylistically well-balanced in a way that’s hard to describe, but it really fills the tank.
For readers who love the strange, who are looking for something to gird their souls to carry on through dark times, this book will give you something real. An image, a question, a feeling. Something to help you keep moving forward.
A woman adrift in life moves back in with her mysterious and spiritually sturdy grandmother in the country when a solar storm illuminates the sky and ends modernity with one great green glimmering pop. Despite this, Jane's grandmother refuses to let the collapse stop the flow of life, and wills their small community and Jane herself along by instilling survival skills, folksy wisdom and sharing her strange power that leaves all who know her feeling strangely charmed and slightly frightened.
The story progresses in stellar form as Jane and those around her struggle to adjust to the strangeness of this new reality as well as the deeper mysteries that have always laid beneath the normal, all while facing their own demons, ghosts and shadows, organic and inexplicable as they are. As those shadows and mysteries come to take center stage, they teem with mythic life I found very exciting as a reader.
So, what is this story really? Well, it's folk horror, sure, as it says on the tin. It's billed as a retelling of Vasilisa the Beautiful, and it certainly reads like a bittersweet Slavic fairy tale meets Southern Gothic Christian isolated homesteading with a 21st century end-times undercurrent. The apocalypse as we commonly envisage it is ever out of view, a tragic, massive calamity, but also just another disturbance to process and trudge through for those who continue on.
"So what if America ends?" Jane's grandmother (sort-of says, I'm paraphrasing here.) "If it does, something new will come, but there's seeds to plant and water to filter today."
One thing I greatly admire about Ivy’s work is that it always manages to be dark with a careful, unforced hand, and it also manages to be life-affirming without offering false platitudes. It’s emotionally & stylistically well-balanced in a way that’s hard to describe, but it really fills the tank.
For readers who love the strange, who are looking for something to gird their souls to carry on through dark times, this book will give you something real. An image, a question, a feeling. Something to help you keep moving forward.
November 12, 2025
The Cellar Below the Cellar is about Jane and her story of self discovery. Stranded during an unprecedented weather event, she finds herself with the unappealing prospect of living with her domineering grandmother and the interfering neighbours in their small community. Jane suffers with arrested development somewhat, a traumatic event in her past has left her unable to fully understand herself both emotionally and spiritually. The events of the book prompt her to confront the truth about herself and the world around her.
This book blends tenderness and warmth with some dark, surreal moments, and in that way this feels very rooted in folkloric storytelling where danger and kindness always sit side by side.
Like the titular Cellar, there is much lurking below the surface in this novel and it would make a great starting point for anyone new to the author’s work. I think it would appeal to readers who enjoyed Marie Helene Bertino’s Parakeet, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and of course, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes.
This book blends tenderness and warmth with some dark, surreal moments, and in that way this feels very rooted in folkloric storytelling where danger and kindness always sit side by side.
Like the titular Cellar, there is much lurking below the surface in this novel and it would make a great starting point for anyone new to the author’s work. I think it would appeal to readers who enjoyed Marie Helene Bertino’s Parakeet, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole, Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and of course, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes.
March 30, 2026
Absolutely loved this one. Surreal, sometimes anxiety-inducing, but also strangely beautiful. A weird fiction coming of age story.
April 26, 2026
Pastor Dan’s demon jars and other reasons to stay out of the basement
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Ivy Grimes has written a folk horror novella that feels like a Grimm fairy tale raised on creek water and Protestant guilt. The Cellar Below the Cellar is strange, funny, genuinely moving, and haunted by an image you won’t shake: a thousand skeleton hands, gentle as feathers, unmaking the dead. This woman can write.
The first thing this book does well is trick you into thinking it’s cozy. A solar storm knocks out every battery and circuit board on the planet, and our narrator Jane, a thirty-three-year-old librarian, gets stranded at her grandmother’s house in the woods. What follows reads, for long stretches, like a post-apocalyptic Little House on the Prairie: pickling vegetables, filtering creek water, planting pumpkins. There are feast days. There are bedpans. Jane complains about gardening with the kind of genuine petulance that made me laugh out loud more than once. And underneath all of it, something is breathing in the basement.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is a folk horror novella about inheritance, and I don’t mean property. Jane’s grandmother is a figure of terrifying competence, a one-legged Swiss-descended maybe-witch who has been preparing for the end of the world with the quiet confidence of someone who has seen several. She wants Jane to go downstairs. Not to the regular cellar full of canned soup and demon jars (we’ll get to the demon jars), but to the cellar below that, where skeleton hands brush the flesh from the dead in a process called the Unraveling. Grandma tends this place. She wants Jane to take over.
What Grimes does best here is texture. The green of the auroras reflecting off a little girl’s face so she looks alien. The smell of Grandma’s house after her mysterious nighttime errands, something boggy and citrusy at once. The way a rag doll flops across a dark bedroom floor, moving with purpose but without anything resembling grace. There’s a moment when Jane loses a green pepper somewhere between the Ospreys’ house and home, just gone from her hands mid-walk, and the casual impossibility of it sits in your stomach like a bad meal. These impressions stick. Grimes writes with a light touch that somehow makes the strange details heavier, and the best passages feel like a dream you can almost but not quite recall the logic of.
Ivy Grimes has been building toward this book for a while. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and has published short fiction in The Baffler, Vastarien, and Maudlin House. Her collection Glass Stories came out through Grimscribe Press, and her debut novel The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion was published by Cemetery Gates Media in 2025, a surreal Southern Gothic riff on Bluebeard that drew comparisons to Richard Brautigan and Karen Russell. On Penn State Altoona’s Horror Joy podcast, Grimes discussed growing up conservative and finding horror through filmmakers like David Lynch. The Cellar Below the Cellar, published by Violet Lichen Books and inspired by “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and the Alpine mythology of Frau Perchta, feels like the convergence of everything she’s been doing: fairy tale logic, Southern strangeness, women figuring out what they’ve inherited from the women before them.
The pacing, though, is where this book tests your patience. The middle third sags under the weight of Jane’s daily routine. How many times can we go to the Ospreys’ house, weed the garden, resent the Ospreys, and walk home? I lost count. Grimes is building a texture of domestic drudgery as a mirror for Jane’s spiritual stagnation, and I respect the intent, but goddamn, there were stretches where I wanted to grab Jane by the shoulders and say “go downstairs already.” The repetition works thematically but not always narratively.
The characters are a mixed bag. Jane herself is genuinely good company, funny in a self-deprecating way that never curdles into performance. Grandma is fantastic, the kind of terrifying matriarch who tells you to freeze yourself to the soil and means it literally. Little Mary is sweet and strange and a bit underwritten, which is fine for a five-year-old but less fine for a character supposedly being groomed as a spiritual heir. Pastor Dan and his wheelbarrow full of demon jars in mason jars covered in construction paper? That’s genuinely funny shit. The Ospreys are effective as petty tyrants, though they veer close to caricature before Grimes gives them the devastating grace note of their murdered son. Derek, the brother-killer who seems too gentle to have done what he did, is the character I wish had gotten more room.
The horror here is almost entirely implied, and that’s both strength and limitation. The Unraveling Place, with its bone fingers and curtained alcoves, is creepy as hell in concept. But because Jane spends the vast majority of the book refusing to go there, we don’t get much sustained time in the scary place itself. When we finally descend, it’s beautiful more than it is frightening. That’s a valid choice, and the image of a thousand skeletal hands gently brushing flesh from the dead is genuinely haunting, but readers expecting dread will find something closer to awe. It’s folk horror in the way that the old stories are horrifying: not through violence but through the implacable strangeness of what lies beneath ordinary life.
This is a good book that keeps almost being a great one. The prose is lovely, the fairy-tale architecture is smart, and the central metaphor of carrying the dead downward so they can be unmade and freed is the kind of idea that lives in your head for days. But the pacing stumbles, some characters get shortchanged, and the refusal to linger in its own darkness means the horror never quite reaches the pitch it’s reaching for. I’d still recommend it to anyone who wants their folk horror contemplative and strange, who likes post-apocalyptic fiction more interested in the soul than the supply chain. Grimes is getting better with every book.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Ivy Grimes has written a folk horror novella that feels like a Grimm fairy tale raised on creek water and Protestant guilt. The Cellar Below the Cellar is strange, funny, genuinely moving, and haunted by an image you won’t shake: a thousand skeleton hands, gentle as feathers, unmaking the dead. This woman can write.
The first thing this book does well is trick you into thinking it’s cozy. A solar storm knocks out every battery and circuit board on the planet, and our narrator Jane, a thirty-three-year-old librarian, gets stranded at her grandmother’s house in the woods. What follows reads, for long stretches, like a post-apocalyptic Little House on the Prairie: pickling vegetables, filtering creek water, planting pumpkins. There are feast days. There are bedpans. Jane complains about gardening with the kind of genuine petulance that made me laugh out loud more than once. And underneath all of it, something is breathing in the basement.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is a folk horror novella about inheritance, and I don’t mean property. Jane’s grandmother is a figure of terrifying competence, a one-legged Swiss-descended maybe-witch who has been preparing for the end of the world with the quiet confidence of someone who has seen several. She wants Jane to go downstairs. Not to the regular cellar full of canned soup and demon jars (we’ll get to the demon jars), but to the cellar below that, where skeleton hands brush the flesh from the dead in a process called the Unraveling. Grandma tends this place. She wants Jane to take over.
What Grimes does best here is texture. The green of the auroras reflecting off a little girl’s face so she looks alien. The smell of Grandma’s house after her mysterious nighttime errands, something boggy and citrusy at once. The way a rag doll flops across a dark bedroom floor, moving with purpose but without anything resembling grace. There’s a moment when Jane loses a green pepper somewhere between the Ospreys’ house and home, just gone from her hands mid-walk, and the casual impossibility of it sits in your stomach like a bad meal. These impressions stick. Grimes writes with a light touch that somehow makes the strange details heavier, and the best passages feel like a dream you can almost but not quite recall the logic of.
Ivy Grimes has been building toward this book for a while. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and has published short fiction in The Baffler, Vastarien, and Maudlin House. Her collection Glass Stories came out through Grimscribe Press, and her debut novel The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion was published by Cemetery Gates Media in 2025, a surreal Southern Gothic riff on Bluebeard that drew comparisons to Richard Brautigan and Karen Russell. On Penn State Altoona’s Horror Joy podcast, Grimes discussed growing up conservative and finding horror through filmmakers like David Lynch. The Cellar Below the Cellar, published by Violet Lichen Books and inspired by “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and the Alpine mythology of Frau Perchta, feels like the convergence of everything she’s been doing: fairy tale logic, Southern strangeness, women figuring out what they’ve inherited from the women before them.
The pacing, though, is where this book tests your patience. The middle third sags under the weight of Jane’s daily routine. How many times can we go to the Ospreys’ house, weed the garden, resent the Ospreys, and walk home? I lost count. Grimes is building a texture of domestic drudgery as a mirror for Jane’s spiritual stagnation, and I respect the intent, but goddamn, there were stretches where I wanted to grab Jane by the shoulders and say “go downstairs already.” The repetition works thematically but not always narratively.
The characters are a mixed bag. Jane herself is genuinely good company, funny in a self-deprecating way that never curdles into performance. Grandma is fantastic, the kind of terrifying matriarch who tells you to freeze yourself to the soil and means it literally. Little Mary is sweet and strange and a bit underwritten, which is fine for a five-year-old but less fine for a character supposedly being groomed as a spiritual heir. Pastor Dan and his wheelbarrow full of demon jars in mason jars covered in construction paper? That’s genuinely funny shit. The Ospreys are effective as petty tyrants, though they veer close to caricature before Grimes gives them the devastating grace note of their murdered son. Derek, the brother-killer who seems too gentle to have done what he did, is the character I wish had gotten more room.
The horror here is almost entirely implied, and that’s both strength and limitation. The Unraveling Place, with its bone fingers and curtained alcoves, is creepy as hell in concept. But because Jane spends the vast majority of the book refusing to go there, we don’t get much sustained time in the scary place itself. When we finally descend, it’s beautiful more than it is frightening. That’s a valid choice, and the image of a thousand skeletal hands gently brushing flesh from the dead is genuinely haunting, but readers expecting dread will find something closer to awe. It’s folk horror in the way that the old stories are horrifying: not through violence but through the implacable strangeness of what lies beneath ordinary life.
This is a good book that keeps almost being a great one. The prose is lovely, the fairy-tale architecture is smart, and the central metaphor of carrying the dead downward so they can be unmade and freed is the kind of idea that lives in your head for days. But the pacing stumbles, some characters get shortchanged, and the refusal to linger in its own darkness means the horror never quite reaches the pitch it’s reaching for. I’d still recommend it to anyone who wants their folk horror contemplative and strange, who likes post-apocalyptic fiction more interested in the soul than the supply chain. Grimes is getting better with every book.
March 25, 2026
Just finished up The Cellar Below the Cellar and I loved it! A truly unique mixture of the whimsy and straightforwardness of myth, hints of direct minimalist approach at times, and at other times mellifluously bursts of occult lyric ephemera. This novella (along with all of Grimes’ work) seems to live at the intersection of Fairytale, 21st century southern life, and bigger questions of life such as love, death and hope, all while the darkness laps out at our ankles like a cursed ocean.
While reading this I felt like I was experiencing if David Lynch and Ernest Hemingway sat down together to pen a 21st century post apocalyptic Bildungsroman fever-dream retelling of a Slavic myth set in the southern United States, filled with Wonder the likes of Lewis, Macdonald, or Dunsany. The characters, their strangeness in their manner and speech, the blend of absurd surrealism, the warmth mixed with darkness felt very Lynchian. It feels as if there are other things to learn from the story, as if each sentence and each image was plucked from the depths where the “big fish” live, as Lynch would say.
I had not read “Vasilisa the Beautiful” before reading this tho I am familiar with Frau Perchta. I like the idea of not just retelling these myths and tales but to breathe new life and dimension into them by exploring the issues and questions facing us today. You find yourself getting frustrated with Jane, thinking she’s childish. But the reality of it is, she’s thinking things a lot of us would think if our current tech/electricity driven world went under. How unfair it is, etc.
I am not sure if I would classify this as folk horror, but then again I don’t think it really fits into one genre. It is its own blend of the classic fantastic fiction, new weird, fable, shapeless dark, and new-age heart.
I read a non-5 star review of the work and I think there are some people that might be expecting something much more horror forward, or won’t get what the work is trying to accomplish. But that’s ok. Everything isn’t for everyone. As Lynch said when people ask him to explain his work and if certain symbols or characters mean anything “bigger”: “It’s all there, it’s all in the movie(work)”
5/5
@grimivys
@violetlichenbooks
@apexbookcompany
While reading this I felt like I was experiencing if David Lynch and Ernest Hemingway sat down together to pen a 21st century post apocalyptic Bildungsroman fever-dream retelling of a Slavic myth set in the southern United States, filled with Wonder the likes of Lewis, Macdonald, or Dunsany. The characters, their strangeness in their manner and speech, the blend of absurd surrealism, the warmth mixed with darkness felt very Lynchian. It feels as if there are other things to learn from the story, as if each sentence and each image was plucked from the depths where the “big fish” live, as Lynch would say.
I had not read “Vasilisa the Beautiful” before reading this tho I am familiar with Frau Perchta. I like the idea of not just retelling these myths and tales but to breathe new life and dimension into them by exploring the issues and questions facing us today. You find yourself getting frustrated with Jane, thinking she’s childish. But the reality of it is, she’s thinking things a lot of us would think if our current tech/electricity driven world went under. How unfair it is, etc.
I am not sure if I would classify this as folk horror, but then again I don’t think it really fits into one genre. It is its own blend of the classic fantastic fiction, new weird, fable, shapeless dark, and new-age heart.
I read a non-5 star review of the work and I think there are some people that might be expecting something much more horror forward, or won’t get what the work is trying to accomplish. But that’s ok. Everything isn’t for everyone. As Lynch said when people ask him to explain his work and if certain symbols or characters mean anything “bigger”: “It’s all there, it’s all in the movie(work)”
5/5
@grimivys
@violetlichenbooks
@apexbookcompany
April 23, 2026
I read this all in one go! I had to know what would happen.
It reminded me of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, with the post-apocalyptic setting and quirky characters.
The world is thrust into the end-times when a catastrophic solar event wipes out the Earth's power. In a small Southern town, Jane and her grandmother are trying to survive. But it's not what you think. Grandma seems to have some sort of special powers and Jane just DOES NOT GET IT.
Along with Jane, we come to realize Grandma's powers, and by extension Jane's. There are strange dolls, dank cellars, hints of magic, demons in jars, and so much more.
Some people have said that Jane acts like a spoiled teenager at 33. But in my mind, Jane is likely autistic. Her hyper-sensitivity to light, texture, smells and her inability to read sub-text, amongst other little hints lead me to this conclusion.
By the end, she does grow up a little as she realizes her true self and accepts it.
If you're a fan of fairy tale retellings, magical realism, and folklore, then I recommend this book.
It reminded me of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, with the post-apocalyptic setting and quirky characters.
The world is thrust into the end-times when a catastrophic solar event wipes out the Earth's power. In a small Southern town, Jane and her grandmother are trying to survive. But it's not what you think. Grandma seems to have some sort of special powers and Jane just DOES NOT GET IT.
Along with Jane, we come to realize Grandma's powers, and by extension Jane's. There are strange dolls, dank cellars, hints of magic, demons in jars, and so much more.
Some people have said that Jane acts like a spoiled teenager at 33. But in my mind, Jane is likely autistic. Her hyper-sensitivity to light, texture, smells and her inability to read sub-text, amongst other little hints lead me to this conclusion.
By the end, she does grow up a little as she realizes her true self and accepts it.
If you're a fan of fairy tale retellings, magical realism, and folklore, then I recommend this book.
March 29, 2026
Dreamy, creepy, lovely. Full of familial regret and despondency, layered with the will of survival and the trauma of living through it. And at the same time, weird as hell in the best possible way. I adored every page.
April 10, 2026
“Why me? Why not me?”
We get so old while feeling young. How does one navigate the unknown and the known, the lived and the unlived? Is that when we finally grow up, when we reach this hinterland and choose a mask, a demon, or a poppet to provide us with words we haven’t been able to speak? Or is it instead when we put them down as playthings and begin to fill out, to occupy space between others and within their homes and lives, and become our own territory? Maybe none of it is ours to decide.
The naive and insouciant narrative voice belies a darkness with teeth. Deceptively simple. Lovely.
We get so old while feeling young. How does one navigate the unknown and the known, the lived and the unlived? Is that when we finally grow up, when we reach this hinterland and choose a mask, a demon, or a poppet to provide us with words we haven’t been able to speak? Or is it instead when we put them down as playthings and begin to fill out, to occupy space between others and within their homes and lives, and become our own territory? Maybe none of it is ours to decide.
The naive and insouciant narrative voice belies a darkness with teeth. Deceptively simple. Lovely.
Read
April 7, 2026I reviewed this book for Fantasy Hive:. And here is the review below:
Everyone, sooner or later, understands death for what it is. Change, revelation, the moment one thing becomes another. Ivy Grimes’s novella, The Cellar Below the Cellar, with its poetic turns of narrative to its easily imaginable characters, reminds me time and time again that to die is not an absence, but a shift in perspective.
Following Jane, the protagonist, after a Miyaki event, we see all the bildungsroman trappings of what it means to change. Jane suddenly has to help her grandma, has to grapple with not being the mature, self-assured (and assuring) matriarch that she is, and has to do things she ultimately loathes doing. In another writer’s hands, the narrative would take all the usual turns any apocalypse would, whereas Grimes rightfully focusses on the reparative constructs that tend to remain whenever globalised orders collapse, that of community, kindness, and, what Grimes likes to untangle most in this novella, faith.
With no digital infrastructure, there’s no screens, and Grimes identifies here more than ever that we are dependent on a world of virtual connections, the same way that believers might have been dependent on their unseen divinity they lay their trust in. When the digital world goes, however, Jane’s daily toil to ensure the community’s safety, her endless chores for Grandma and a particularly nasty family by the name of Osprey, reminds us reading that faith in a structure, in each other, in order, is built on praxis. We must act as we believe if what is believed can manifest. Jane has difficult choices to make, difficult decisions to ponder, and it’s deeply touching in the way any story about growing up and making sacrifices tends to be.
It really feels like a reclamation of nihilism, if anything else. A word so easily used to disparage any pessimistic outlook. In reality, the word has been taken from its meaning. Nihilism is the fundamental power anyone has to make meaning out of the world. If anything, what Grimes argues we need in a world wrought by disconnection, violence, and murder, is more people willing to make meaning out of a world so desperate to keep itself mysterious. In such a time, and in such a place, anyone could do anything; could kill—will kill—with seeming impunity. This is the kind of environment in which older, stranger (and sometimes even kinder) powers are at work, and these are the forces that Grimes brings to bear in her fiction, using folklore and archetype as fertilizer for her world-building.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is a tale narrativising how tales are powerful modems of faith. Not faithful as in the sense of devoted to religion, but to one another. In Grimes’ world, someone will tend your garden if you are ill; they might even store your demon-filled jars for you, no matter how strange that request might seem. The overarching theme that emerges is one of community—that sometimes just “putting up with one another” is a profound and constant act of faith.
When we first meet Jane, she appears passive, unable to understand how to interact with this brand new world, with its strange contours and stranger inhabitants. Even those who were once familiar—like her oddly-adept-at-survival grandmother—become alien to her, suddenly foisting upon her familial demands. Jane herself feels oddly transparent to us, like glass that we use as a lens to see through. That transparency is nothing but narrative porosity. If she is easy to see through, it's because Jane isn’t the person she needs to be—yet.
I am purposefully occluding a deeper interaction with the subterranean plot of this novella—the cellar, as it were, of the The Cellar Below the Cellar. It is the final hurdles where that porosity obscures, becomes murky, and the deep intensities that tangle up a life weave tight Jane and her connection to the world, so that as the narrative closes up, Jane’s eyes open to the wealth of history she is connected to, to the mysterious Unraveling, to how death and souls and minds all work. We get the sense that we are the buried thing, in the novella, and when the cellar below the cellar makes itself manifest, when the deeper secrets about the Unravelling, about how flesh turns to air, how dying breaths meet the milk of empyrean mountains, we are already so beholden to the idea that faith keeps us here that we are ready and willing to let Jane command and steer the ship of the narrative. Grimes manages to really flesh out the sometimes intangible ideas of apocalypse, of blowing trumpets and falling stars. It really is spectacular, and idiosyncratic in all the ways masterful works of fiction are. Grimes reminds us that the end of the world is more the end of some power structure’s idea of the world, and that a million worlds end every day, in murdered sons or abandoned daughters, in lost pets and waning grandparents. By the end of the novella, when Jane feels ready to take on the world so confusing to her, with all its occultic accouterments and haunting lineage, Ivy Grimes reminds us that the world always ends—and it’s people like Jane, like us, that we keep faith in to bring the core, vitalities—of the vulnerable, the lonely, the sick and the sad—together.
Everyone, sooner or later, understands death for what it is. Change, revelation, the moment one thing becomes another. Ivy Grimes’s novella, The Cellar Below the Cellar, with its poetic turns of narrative to its easily imaginable characters, reminds me time and time again that to die is not an absence, but a shift in perspective.
Following Jane, the protagonist, after a Miyaki event, we see all the bildungsroman trappings of what it means to change. Jane suddenly has to help her grandma, has to grapple with not being the mature, self-assured (and assuring) matriarch that she is, and has to do things she ultimately loathes doing. In another writer’s hands, the narrative would take all the usual turns any apocalypse would, whereas Grimes rightfully focusses on the reparative constructs that tend to remain whenever globalised orders collapse, that of community, kindness, and, what Grimes likes to untangle most in this novella, faith.
With no digital infrastructure, there’s no screens, and Grimes identifies here more than ever that we are dependent on a world of virtual connections, the same way that believers might have been dependent on their unseen divinity they lay their trust in. When the digital world goes, however, Jane’s daily toil to ensure the community’s safety, her endless chores for Grandma and a particularly nasty family by the name of Osprey, reminds us reading that faith in a structure, in each other, in order, is built on praxis. We must act as we believe if what is believed can manifest. Jane has difficult choices to make, difficult decisions to ponder, and it’s deeply touching in the way any story about growing up and making sacrifices tends to be.
It really feels like a reclamation of nihilism, if anything else. A word so easily used to disparage any pessimistic outlook. In reality, the word has been taken from its meaning. Nihilism is the fundamental power anyone has to make meaning out of the world. If anything, what Grimes argues we need in a world wrought by disconnection, violence, and murder, is more people willing to make meaning out of a world so desperate to keep itself mysterious. In such a time, and in such a place, anyone could do anything; could kill—will kill—with seeming impunity. This is the kind of environment in which older, stranger (and sometimes even kinder) powers are at work, and these are the forces that Grimes brings to bear in her fiction, using folklore and archetype as fertilizer for her world-building.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is a tale narrativising how tales are powerful modems of faith. Not faithful as in the sense of devoted to religion, but to one another. In Grimes’ world, someone will tend your garden if you are ill; they might even store your demon-filled jars for you, no matter how strange that request might seem. The overarching theme that emerges is one of community—that sometimes just “putting up with one another” is a profound and constant act of faith.
When we first meet Jane, she appears passive, unable to understand how to interact with this brand new world, with its strange contours and stranger inhabitants. Even those who were once familiar—like her oddly-adept-at-survival grandmother—become alien to her, suddenly foisting upon her familial demands. Jane herself feels oddly transparent to us, like glass that we use as a lens to see through. That transparency is nothing but narrative porosity. If she is easy to see through, it's because Jane isn’t the person she needs to be—yet.
I am purposefully occluding a deeper interaction with the subterranean plot of this novella—the cellar, as it were, of the The Cellar Below the Cellar. It is the final hurdles where that porosity obscures, becomes murky, and the deep intensities that tangle up a life weave tight Jane and her connection to the world, so that as the narrative closes up, Jane’s eyes open to the wealth of history she is connected to, to the mysterious Unraveling, to how death and souls and minds all work. We get the sense that we are the buried thing, in the novella, and when the cellar below the cellar makes itself manifest, when the deeper secrets about the Unravelling, about how flesh turns to air, how dying breaths meet the milk of empyrean mountains, we are already so beholden to the idea that faith keeps us here that we are ready and willing to let Jane command and steer the ship of the narrative. Grimes manages to really flesh out the sometimes intangible ideas of apocalypse, of blowing trumpets and falling stars. It really is spectacular, and idiosyncratic in all the ways masterful works of fiction are. Grimes reminds us that the end of the world is more the end of some power structure’s idea of the world, and that a million worlds end every day, in murdered sons or abandoned daughters, in lost pets and waning grandparents. By the end of the novella, when Jane feels ready to take on the world so confusing to her, with all its occultic accouterments and haunting lineage, Ivy Grimes reminds us that the world always ends—and it’s people like Jane, like us, that we keep faith in to bring the core, vitalities—of the vulnerable, the lonely, the sick and the sad—together.
February 22, 2026
The Cellar Below the Cellar follows a 30-something woman who had been visiting her rural grandmother when a solar storm knocked out all electronics across the neighborhood—and presumably across the world. And yet her grandmother doesn’t seem much surprised and springs immediately into teaching their neighbors how to survive in this new, low-tech world. While full of ideas, her grandmother is sparing with information and consistently frustrated with the lead’s indecision and fear of the titular cellar below the cellar, where lurks something magical, and perhaps horrible. In case the “presumably across the world” line didn’t clue you in, The Cellar Below the Cellar isn’t interested in exploring the wide-ranging societal impacts of the event. Instead, it focuses on the few people within walking range, with a particular focus on the progression of the lead’s ability to navigate both the mystical and the mundane.
While “something dark and scary in the cellar below the cellar” sounds like a straightforward horror premise, The Cellar Below the Cellar doesn’t necessarily feel like a horror story. There are several creepy elements that have the characters themselves terrified, but they engender more curiosity than fear in the readers. I’ve also seen it pitched as an adult coming-of-age, and that’s a bit closer. While the lead is fully grown when the story starts, she knows nothing of magic or how to handle an apocalyptic event, leading her to rely almost entirely on her grandmother for direction. The way that changes over the course of the novella feels like the tale’s major arc. Certainly, magic is revealed, but this isn’t the sort of book leading to a big, supernatural battle, nor is it a book about the reshaping of the world writ large. Instead, it’s about coming to terms with the natural and supernatural world as it is, right here and right now, and learning how to live in that knowledge.
It also isn’t the sort of book that’s going to spoonfeed the reader with clean, simple characters. The opening chapter leads with a demon-hunting pastor that I was utterly convinced would be the villain, just as I was convinced the lead’s grandmother would be the implacable, wise mentor. The truth is much more complicated. The lead’s grandmother is implacable and expert in key disciplines—both magical and mundane—but she’s often callous and is so extraordinarily tight-fisted with information as to almost seem like the villain at times. The pastor, on the other hand, seems earnest and likable enough, and there’s no voice-of-God to definitively tell the reader exactly what to make of the demon-hunting. This generalizes through the novella: the characters are consistently messy, with their own strengths and weaknesses and no one trait that defines their entire person, no matter how important that trait may be.
Ultimately, The Cellar Below the Cellar is an engaging novella for fans of small-scale stories with unexplained weirdness. It does offer a satisfying arc, but not an epic one, and it has no interest in ensuring that every flawed character is punished. The prose style doesn’t accentuate the horror elements so much as it centers the lead’s psychological journey in the ways she responds, but it’s a style that absolutely makes you want to keep reading. It’s not in my typical niche, and I’m probably not the book’s ideal audience, but I’m quite sure it will be a delight for readers looking for its particular sort of oddness.
While “something dark and scary in the cellar below the cellar” sounds like a straightforward horror premise, The Cellar Below the Cellar doesn’t necessarily feel like a horror story. There are several creepy elements that have the characters themselves terrified, but they engender more curiosity than fear in the readers. I’ve also seen it pitched as an adult coming-of-age, and that’s a bit closer. While the lead is fully grown when the story starts, she knows nothing of magic or how to handle an apocalyptic event, leading her to rely almost entirely on her grandmother for direction. The way that changes over the course of the novella feels like the tale’s major arc. Certainly, magic is revealed, but this isn’t the sort of book leading to a big, supernatural battle, nor is it a book about the reshaping of the world writ large. Instead, it’s about coming to terms with the natural and supernatural world as it is, right here and right now, and learning how to live in that knowledge.
It also isn’t the sort of book that’s going to spoonfeed the reader with clean, simple characters. The opening chapter leads with a demon-hunting pastor that I was utterly convinced would be the villain, just as I was convinced the lead’s grandmother would be the implacable, wise mentor. The truth is much more complicated. The lead’s grandmother is implacable and expert in key disciplines—both magical and mundane—but she’s often callous and is so extraordinarily tight-fisted with information as to almost seem like the villain at times. The pastor, on the other hand, seems earnest and likable enough, and there’s no voice-of-God to definitively tell the reader exactly what to make of the demon-hunting. This generalizes through the novella: the characters are consistently messy, with their own strengths and weaknesses and no one trait that defines their entire person, no matter how important that trait may be.
Ultimately, The Cellar Below the Cellar is an engaging novella for fans of small-scale stories with unexplained weirdness. It does offer a satisfying arc, but not an epic one, and it has no interest in ensuring that every flawed character is punished. The prose style doesn’t accentuate the horror elements so much as it centers the lead’s psychological journey in the ways she responds, but it’s a style that absolutely makes you want to keep reading. It’s not in my typical niche, and I’m probably not the book’s ideal audience, but I’m quite sure it will be a delight for readers looking for its particular sort of oddness.
April 23, 2026
Ivy Grimes is one of my favorite contemporary writers of weird horror and absurdist, difficult-to-classify fiction. There is such a creative and confident internal logic to her tales that make even the oddest of turns feel perfectly sensible and satisfying within the highly imaginative worlds she creates. Really loved reading "The Cellar Below the Cellar" and already counting down the hours 'til the next one.
May 12, 2026
A modern fairy-tale of a woman (and her community) growing strong through calamity. This work defies the individualist end-of-the-world narrative and instead offers duty to others as our chief inheritance when those we love move on. The novella is populated with odd characters who all belong together in their care for life and after-life. Grimes' prose comes alive when she speaks for the dead.
Read
May 26, 2026I knocked this novella out in one sitting. With a folk horror label right on the cover, I went in with certain expectations but they were delivered in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s surreal, unnerving, and surprisingly lovely. As I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the weird and obscure folktales that I enjoyed when I was little. I would consider this to be cozy horror.
April 26, 2026
Wonderful story, a not so dystopian end of the world.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
3.5 stars
The nitty-gritty: A mysterious cellar is at the center of this short but impactful tale about change and acceptance.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is an odd little story with a strong folktale vibe, and I enjoyed it! It’s sort of a mash-up of different genres, so it’s hard to pigeonhole it into just one. There are dystopian, horror, fairy tale and coming-of-age elements, as well as some very odd characters, all of which make up a unique tale that will resonant with readers who enjoy their stories on the weird side. I would have rated this higher, but the plot was too meandering to completely pull me in.
Jane is visiting her Grandma one day when a strange electromagnetic event takes place. A green, shimmering light appears in the sky, and all electrical devices fail, including cell phones. Grandma doesn’t seem surprised, in fact, she’s prepared for it by stocking the cellar with food and supplies. Jane, however, is upset and shocked that the government didn’t warn them. Grandma insists they visit the nearby neighbors and check on them, and soon they’ve formed a tight community to help each other through the challenges of surviving without life’s necessities.
Grandma keeps talking about the “cellar below the cellar,” a mysterious lower level in her house where something important happens. Jane is afraid to go there, but Grandma tells her someday she’ll understand. As the days turn to weeks and months, Jane must come to terms with her strange new life.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is a slice-of-life story, focusing on just a few characters in one neighborhood. The reader never gets a sense of a wider catastrophe, so the story feels very intimate. We see Grandma, Jane, and a handful of neighbors go through the day to day motions of growing and gathering crops, filtering water from a river, and helping each other with child care. One of the odder characters, a man called Pastor Dan, shows up occasionally with a wheelbarrow-full of glass jars, each one (he claims) holding a demon. He asks Grandma to store them in the cellar for him, which she readily does.
Grimes uses elements from two tales for inspiration: Vasilisa the Beautiful, a Russian fairy tale about a magical doll, and the myth of Frau Perchta, an Alpine goddess who sounds a lot like Crampus. I had never heard of either of these stories, so I looked them up, and yes, I can see the influences in this story. Grandma gives Jane a life-sized magical doll to help with her work, and perhaps Grandma represents the Perchta character? Not sure, but it sort of makes sense. Grimes’s prose is simple yet lyrical and evokes a folkloric, fairy tale feel.
As for characters, this is really Jane’s story. Jane is a thirty-something year old woman, but she has the speech and demeanor—and emotional reactions—of a child, which I thought was an interesting way to portray her. She seeks approval for everything she does from her Grandma, and though she longs to return to her own apartment and her library job, Grandma convinces her to stay. When she finally comes to terms with what’s in the cellar below the cellar, she has literally “grown up” before the reader’s eyes. I liked Jane a lot and felt bad for how anxious she was. But I did not like Grandma (she’s strict and doesn’t give Jane the emotional support she needs).
The mystery of the cellar below the cellar is stretched out until almost the end and ties into Jane’s coming-of-age story. I was expecting something more horrific down there, so I was a little disappointed with the reveal (I wanted Pastor Dan and his jars full of demons to be involved somehow!), but Grimes goes for more of an emotional reveal. The end sees some changes for this little group of survivors, and I loved the hopeful ending with new beginnings for everyone.
Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.
The nitty-gritty: A mysterious cellar is at the center of this short but impactful tale about change and acceptance.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is an odd little story with a strong folktale vibe, and I enjoyed it! It’s sort of a mash-up of different genres, so it’s hard to pigeonhole it into just one. There are dystopian, horror, fairy tale and coming-of-age elements, as well as some very odd characters, all of which make up a unique tale that will resonant with readers who enjoy their stories on the weird side. I would have rated this higher, but the plot was too meandering to completely pull me in.
Jane is visiting her Grandma one day when a strange electromagnetic event takes place. A green, shimmering light appears in the sky, and all electrical devices fail, including cell phones. Grandma doesn’t seem surprised, in fact, she’s prepared for it by stocking the cellar with food and supplies. Jane, however, is upset and shocked that the government didn’t warn them. Grandma insists they visit the nearby neighbors and check on them, and soon they’ve formed a tight community to help each other through the challenges of surviving without life’s necessities.
Grandma keeps talking about the “cellar below the cellar,” a mysterious lower level in her house where something important happens. Jane is afraid to go there, but Grandma tells her someday she’ll understand. As the days turn to weeks and months, Jane must come to terms with her strange new life.
The Cellar Below the Cellar is a slice-of-life story, focusing on just a few characters in one neighborhood. The reader never gets a sense of a wider catastrophe, so the story feels very intimate. We see Grandma, Jane, and a handful of neighbors go through the day to day motions of growing and gathering crops, filtering water from a river, and helping each other with child care. One of the odder characters, a man called Pastor Dan, shows up occasionally with a wheelbarrow-full of glass jars, each one (he claims) holding a demon. He asks Grandma to store them in the cellar for him, which she readily does.
Grimes uses elements from two tales for inspiration: Vasilisa the Beautiful, a Russian fairy tale about a magical doll, and the myth of Frau Perchta, an Alpine goddess who sounds a lot like Crampus. I had never heard of either of these stories, so I looked them up, and yes, I can see the influences in this story. Grandma gives Jane a life-sized magical doll to help with her work, and perhaps Grandma represents the Perchta character? Not sure, but it sort of makes sense. Grimes’s prose is simple yet lyrical and evokes a folkloric, fairy tale feel.
As for characters, this is really Jane’s story. Jane is a thirty-something year old woman, but she has the speech and demeanor—and emotional reactions—of a child, which I thought was an interesting way to portray her. She seeks approval for everything she does from her Grandma, and though she longs to return to her own apartment and her library job, Grandma convinces her to stay. When she finally comes to terms with what’s in the cellar below the cellar, she has literally “grown up” before the reader’s eyes. I liked Jane a lot and felt bad for how anxious she was. But I did not like Grandma (she’s strict and doesn’t give Jane the emotional support she needs).
The mystery of the cellar below the cellar is stretched out until almost the end and ties into Jane’s coming-of-age story. I was expecting something more horrific down there, so I was a little disappointed with the reveal (I wanted Pastor Dan and his jars full of demons to be involved somehow!), but Grimes goes for more of an emotional reveal. The end sees some changes for this little group of survivors, and I loved the hopeful ending with new beginnings for everyone.
Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Imagine if tomorrow there was no electricity. Most people would be struggling just to remember how to build a fire. Who would you turn to for help? Do you know your neighbors well enough to work with them? From Ivy Grimes, The Cellar Below the Cellar pushes a community closer together and forces everyone to face their fears.
Right away, the reader is introduced to unique characters. Paster Dan has been collecting demons which he stores in jar in his basement. Not just a spiritual hobby, he finds that it’s perfect for a third date, an idea Jane does not agree with. The Bundren family, a husband, wife, and three children, keeps to themselves. Withholding resources from the rest of the neighbors, isolation will be their undoing. Stephanie, a single mom with two children, is barely able to get out of bed when she falls into depression. Jane will be Stephanie’s greatest source of motivation. The Osprey family is pushy, nasty, and hiding a secret that stands to destroy their family. When their son, Derek, pulls into town, the true purpose of the cellar below the cellar is revealed.
In addition to the neighbors is Jane’s grandma, a strong, industrious woman. The relationship between Jane and her grandma is tense at best as the two are continuously at odds with each other. Grandma constantly reminds Jane of her birth rite, something she won’t fully explain and expects Jane to figure out on her own. All Jane knows is that it has something to do with her mother who died when she was very young. There are rare tender moments between the two that seem to mend their relationship. Though, the scenes where Jane is angry, even expressing hate for her grandma, seem more genuine.
Grimes does an amazing job of showcasing natural and supernatural horror. The unease and suspicion created when a natural event like the Disaster occurs is enough by itself. Then, force proximity with a neighbor everyone is convinced is a witch, throw in some spirits and… you have a unique twist on a post-apocalyptic story.
The use of European pagan and Christian religious elements ones is tastefully done. At no time did it feel like one or the other was being beaten up on or made to stand out as superior. Some of the religious characters experience a crisis of faith along the way and are supported by members of the other side without judgement.
At times, Jane serves more as a lens for the reader than a character in the story. When she expresses emotion, there is a tendency for her to overreact to minor situations or barely acknowledge tragic events. Despite this, the supporting characters more than make up for it, especially when everyone starts showing their true colors.
From Ivy Grimes, The Cellar Below the Cellar is the story of a woman coming into her birth rite and a community learning to work together. If helping the dead cross over and overcoming an apocalyptic event is your type of story, I recommend this novella.
Right away, the reader is introduced to unique characters. Paster Dan has been collecting demons which he stores in jar in his basement. Not just a spiritual hobby, he finds that it’s perfect for a third date, an idea Jane does not agree with. The Bundren family, a husband, wife, and three children, keeps to themselves. Withholding resources from the rest of the neighbors, isolation will be their undoing. Stephanie, a single mom with two children, is barely able to get out of bed when she falls into depression. Jane will be Stephanie’s greatest source of motivation. The Osprey family is pushy, nasty, and hiding a secret that stands to destroy their family. When their son, Derek, pulls into town, the true purpose of the cellar below the cellar is revealed.
In addition to the neighbors is Jane’s grandma, a strong, industrious woman. The relationship between Jane and her grandma is tense at best as the two are continuously at odds with each other. Grandma constantly reminds Jane of her birth rite, something she won’t fully explain and expects Jane to figure out on her own. All Jane knows is that it has something to do with her mother who died when she was very young. There are rare tender moments between the two that seem to mend their relationship. Though, the scenes where Jane is angry, even expressing hate for her grandma, seem more genuine.
Grimes does an amazing job of showcasing natural and supernatural horror. The unease and suspicion created when a natural event like the Disaster occurs is enough by itself. Then, force proximity with a neighbor everyone is convinced is a witch, throw in some spirits and… you have a unique twist on a post-apocalyptic story.
The use of European pagan and Christian religious elements ones is tastefully done. At no time did it feel like one or the other was being beaten up on or made to stand out as superior. Some of the religious characters experience a crisis of faith along the way and are supported by members of the other side without judgement.
At times, Jane serves more as a lens for the reader than a character in the story. When she expresses emotion, there is a tendency for her to overreact to minor situations or barely acknowledge tragic events. Despite this, the supporting characters more than make up for it, especially when everyone starts showing their true colors.
From Ivy Grimes, The Cellar Below the Cellar is the story of a woman coming into her birth rite and a community learning to work together. If helping the dead cross over and overcoming an apocalyptic event is your type of story, I recommend this novella.
November 10, 2025
The Cellar Below the Cellar is being billed as a folk horror novella. This is an odd choice, because it's so much more than that. Yes, there are elements of the sub-genre here—there are mysteries, and characters presenting in the form of cipher, there is even threat that hovers around the edges, but this is a unique, rare author, an alchemist of fiction. In everything Ivy Grimes writes, there is marvel and there is wonder, and both of these qualities transcend trappings such as genre or category.
Much of the story here is occulted from the reader. Things happen, characters move in and out of the frame, and magic is a routine, almost expected, occurrence. This magic is inexplicable, it simply exists as a part of the world set up for the reader to puzzle through. There are invisible demons in jars and there are dolls which may or may not be sentient; over everything is the strangely hesitant feeling of a dream. The world is ending, civilization is collapsing—or perhaps it isn't. What is presented on its face may be wearing a mask, but the author does not tear it off for you—it is up to you, the reader, to decide if you wish to reveal the truth beneath.
States of personal stasis and evolution seem to suggest that this is more of a Bildungsroman, but the coming of age is coming a bit late. A less-nuanced reader might write off the protagonist as "immature" or even "young," but here, it is simply that they are childlike, especially when thrown unceremoniously into this frighteningly new world, and especially when juxtaposed with a character like Grandma, whose eccentricities might seem at first to be the result of senility but which are actually anything but. In much the same way, elements of the narrative which might be categorized as be whimsical or nonsensical might be inextricably linked to the story, despite only seeming tertiary. Nothing is what it seems, and it is this uncanny unbalancing act that I find so extraordinary about Ivy Grimes' work. No one else so gently unmoors me as she.
As with all of the author's work, The Cellar Below the Cellar possesses a wild sense of wonder married to a sense of menace—one juxtaposed against the other in a frame that keeps disappearing when you stare too long at the overlap of the two. I personally like Ivy's work best when it leans more into the menace, but if I’ve learned anything from reading her, not everything need be a Manichaean struggle between light and dark—often it’s in the subtlest of shadows where I find the most meaning. Regardless, it always tickles my brain to read, and trying to solve the puzzle of the work in question is delightful. The Cellar Below the Cellar is no exception.
Much of the story here is occulted from the reader. Things happen, characters move in and out of the frame, and magic is a routine, almost expected, occurrence. This magic is inexplicable, it simply exists as a part of the world set up for the reader to puzzle through. There are invisible demons in jars and there are dolls which may or may not be sentient; over everything is the strangely hesitant feeling of a dream. The world is ending, civilization is collapsing—or perhaps it isn't. What is presented on its face may be wearing a mask, but the author does not tear it off for you—it is up to you, the reader, to decide if you wish to reveal the truth beneath.
States of personal stasis and evolution seem to suggest that this is more of a Bildungsroman, but the coming of age is coming a bit late. A less-nuanced reader might write off the protagonist as "immature" or even "young," but here, it is simply that they are childlike, especially when thrown unceremoniously into this frighteningly new world, and especially when juxtaposed with a character like Grandma, whose eccentricities might seem at first to be the result of senility but which are actually anything but. In much the same way, elements of the narrative which might be categorized as be whimsical or nonsensical might be inextricably linked to the story, despite only seeming tertiary. Nothing is what it seems, and it is this uncanny unbalancing act that I find so extraordinary about Ivy Grimes' work. No one else so gently unmoors me as she.
As with all of the author's work, The Cellar Below the Cellar possesses a wild sense of wonder married to a sense of menace—one juxtaposed against the other in a frame that keeps disappearing when you stare too long at the overlap of the two. I personally like Ivy's work best when it leans more into the menace, but if I’ve learned anything from reading her, not everything need be a Manichaean struggle between light and dark—often it’s in the subtlest of shadows where I find the most meaning. Regardless, it always tickles my brain to read, and trying to solve the puzzle of the work in question is delightful. The Cellar Below the Cellar is no exception.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
When I heard that the latest publication from Violet Lichen Books was a folktale-inspired horror novella, I knew I had to read it right away. Ivy Grimes’ The Cellar Below the Cellar beautifully combines elements from the Alpine figure Frau Perchta and the Russian fairy tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful”.
It starts, as all good stories do, at the end: Jane is forced to take refuge in her grandmother’s isolated house after a mysterious solar storm knocks out all electric power. Following her mother’s passing, Jane was raised by her grandmother, a strict woman who insists that they use her extensive collection of doomsday supplies to help their few neighbours. With the power grid totally dead and clean water running out, they must quickly adapt to this new way of living while the weather is still warm.
However, it soon becomes apparent that there’s something off about the situation; not only is Jane’s grandmother hiding secrets, but the Ospreys, their demanding neighbours, keep piling chores on her and treating her as if she’s a child. On top of the literal atmospheric phenomena, the eponymous subcellar inspires a potent atmosphere of creeping dread, and Jane can’t quite pinpoint why she’s so terrified of going down there. Grimes plays with ambiguity: is Jane inheriting her late mother’s mental health issues, or is there really something supernatural afoot?
Without going into spoilers, I will say that I love how the fantasy elements of this story are incorporated. Jane’s gradual immersion is the perfect way to keep the reader guessing what may really be going on, and what’s waiting for Jane down in the cellar. It’s impressive how well Grimes conveys entire seasons passing within such a limited word count, which makes Jane’s acceptance of the strange developments much more believable.
The Cellar Below the Cellar poignantly deals with death and grief, including recent losses and moving on from old wounds, as well as the importance of community and embracing one’s talents within it. Grimes’ penchant for the morbid and strange perfectly suits the tone of the original, darker versions of fairy tales, and left me enraptured with every page.
This review is crossposted: https://imaginatlas.ca/catch-of-the-m...
It starts, as all good stories do, at the end: Jane is forced to take refuge in her grandmother’s isolated house after a mysterious solar storm knocks out all electric power. Following her mother’s passing, Jane was raised by her grandmother, a strict woman who insists that they use her extensive collection of doomsday supplies to help their few neighbours. With the power grid totally dead and clean water running out, they must quickly adapt to this new way of living while the weather is still warm.
However, it soon becomes apparent that there’s something off about the situation; not only is Jane’s grandmother hiding secrets, but the Ospreys, their demanding neighbours, keep piling chores on her and treating her as if she’s a child. On top of the literal atmospheric phenomena, the eponymous subcellar inspires a potent atmosphere of creeping dread, and Jane can’t quite pinpoint why she’s so terrified of going down there. Grimes plays with ambiguity: is Jane inheriting her late mother’s mental health issues, or is there really something supernatural afoot?
Without going into spoilers, I will say that I love how the fantasy elements of this story are incorporated. Jane’s gradual immersion is the perfect way to keep the reader guessing what may really be going on, and what’s waiting for Jane down in the cellar. It’s impressive how well Grimes conveys entire seasons passing within such a limited word count, which makes Jane’s acceptance of the strange developments much more believable.
The Cellar Below the Cellar poignantly deals with death and grief, including recent losses and moving on from old wounds, as well as the importance of community and embracing one’s talents within it. Grimes’ penchant for the morbid and strange perfectly suits the tone of the original, darker versions of fairy tales, and left me enraptured with every page.
This review is crossposted: https://imaginatlas.ca/catch-of-the-m...
April 13, 2026
This is a strange little coming into your own story about a woman who finds herself trapped at her grandmother’s house by circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
Jane was visiting her grandma when a loud pop awakened her from sleep to find the sky glowing. It’s not aliens (that we know of!) but a mysterious aurora-like light arrived and apparently doesn’t have plans to leave. It knocked out power and forced them to live off the grid. This actually feels like a not so bad option in 2026. Technology has gone poof and they learn to help out their walkable neighbors in their teeny community. Well, some of them anyway. Some are just bossy, entitled and excellent at overstepping but that’s how some people are so it felt realistic.
This is a slower paced, odd little book with some quirky characters. Jane is the main character. She’s 30ish but she reads much younger for some strange reason. Initially, she’s annoyed that she can’t return to her life and her friends, but she does what she has to do which is mostly obey her grandma who runs hot and cold and who is busy most nights doing things. Grandma is also keeping secrets in the cellar under the cellar. Grandma’s house has layers and one of them is very bizarre. Jane’s journey is accepting this new life, finding her own strength and accepting her fate as she maneuvers a bunch of personalities. There aren’t a lot of answers here for those with enquiring minds. It’s more of a go with the flow as they go about their day doing what they need to do to survive type of story.
It’s a slower tale and for being so few of pages, it felt much longer. It is inspired by the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and the mythology around Frau Perchta, neither of which I knew anything about, so I looked them up and it all fits. If you like a dark little tale that’s slightly eerie, not too gory and deals with loss with care and gentle hands, I’d recommend this one to you. I liked that it had a slightly hopeful vibe where many end of the world (as we know it) type books tend to dwell on the dreadful men and nihilistic aspects of civilization. People can be dreadful but there’s some hope if you keep on keeping on without falling into evil!
Jane was visiting her grandma when a loud pop awakened her from sleep to find the sky glowing. It’s not aliens (that we know of!) but a mysterious aurora-like light arrived and apparently doesn’t have plans to leave. It knocked out power and forced them to live off the grid. This actually feels like a not so bad option in 2026. Technology has gone poof and they learn to help out their walkable neighbors in their teeny community. Well, some of them anyway. Some are just bossy, entitled and excellent at overstepping but that’s how some people are so it felt realistic.
This is a slower paced, odd little book with some quirky characters. Jane is the main character. She’s 30ish but she reads much younger for some strange reason. Initially, she’s annoyed that she can’t return to her life and her friends, but she does what she has to do which is mostly obey her grandma who runs hot and cold and who is busy most nights doing things. Grandma is also keeping secrets in the cellar under the cellar. Grandma’s house has layers and one of them is very bizarre. Jane’s journey is accepting this new life, finding her own strength and accepting her fate as she maneuvers a bunch of personalities. There aren’t a lot of answers here for those with enquiring minds. It’s more of a go with the flow as they go about their day doing what they need to do to survive type of story.
It’s a slower tale and for being so few of pages, it felt much longer. It is inspired by the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and the mythology around Frau Perchta, neither of which I knew anything about, so I looked them up and it all fits. If you like a dark little tale that’s slightly eerie, not too gory and deals with loss with care and gentle hands, I’d recommend this one to you. I liked that it had a slightly hopeful vibe where many end of the world (as we know it) type books tend to dwell on the dreadful men and nihilistic aspects of civilization. People can be dreadful but there’s some hope if you keep on keeping on without falling into evil!
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Grimes’s prose is impactful and poetic, pulling you in as the world ends around the characters within. The novella follows the protagonist, Jane, who is living a normal life when — visiting her grandmother — an event happens and the world as she knows it ends.
What follows is a soft, gentle reckoning. What does it mean to confront death? To survive and need to continue surviving. When your worst worry the day before was finding a date, a partner, and now its finding food, dealing with a strangeness in the land, and the secrets left unconfronted? She contends with mourning the life she knew, grappling with new responsibilties, and the knowledge that something waits in the cellar beneath the cellar.
Jane’s grandmother, in all this, remains calm, mysterious, and at times — frustrating. She guides as much as allows Jane the space to flounder. Send her out to aid the strange neighbours as everyone bands together to survive.
Normally coming of age stories refer to kids, teens, but The Cellar Below The Cellar is a story about a modern woman caught in the limbo of the modern world and given the chance to come into her own with a world altering event. Jane is forced to grow up, take charge, pick up responsibility in a new reality where she must depend on others and allow others to depend on her.
Written like a vintage, delicate, and beautiful fairy tale, this novella is comforting and hopeful, even in its darkness.
And what lies in the cellar beneath the cellar? You’ll have to read it for yourself to find out.
Overall, I was really sucked into the story and loved being swathed in Grimes’s writing. To me, this was such a hopeful story — that life can change for the better no matter what. That anyone can have their “coming of age” and I love that.
I also really loved the fantastical fairy tale elements of the novella — from the cellar, to the dolls, to the demon jars, to the classic grandmother in the woods. This novella is definitely on my favourites list.
What follows is a soft, gentle reckoning. What does it mean to confront death? To survive and need to continue surviving. When your worst worry the day before was finding a date, a partner, and now its finding food, dealing with a strangeness in the land, and the secrets left unconfronted? She contends with mourning the life she knew, grappling with new responsibilties, and the knowledge that something waits in the cellar beneath the cellar.
Jane’s grandmother, in all this, remains calm, mysterious, and at times — frustrating. She guides as much as allows Jane the space to flounder. Send her out to aid the strange neighbours as everyone bands together to survive.
Normally coming of age stories refer to kids, teens, but The Cellar Below The Cellar is a story about a modern woman caught in the limbo of the modern world and given the chance to come into her own with a world altering event. Jane is forced to grow up, take charge, pick up responsibility in a new reality where she must depend on others and allow others to depend on her.
Written like a vintage, delicate, and beautiful fairy tale, this novella is comforting and hopeful, even in its darkness.
And what lies in the cellar beneath the cellar? You’ll have to read it for yourself to find out.
Overall, I was really sucked into the story and loved being swathed in Grimes’s writing. To me, this was such a hopeful story — that life can change for the better no matter what. That anyone can have their “coming of age” and I love that.
I also really loved the fantastical fairy tale elements of the novella — from the cellar, to the dolls, to the demon jars, to the classic grandmother in the woods. This novella is definitely on my favourites list.
March 28, 2026
This is exactly my kind of horror setup: something inexplicable and catastrophic happens to the world and the people affected have to carry on as best they can. Jane is visiting her grandmother's house in the woods when an intense solar storm wipes out all electronic equipment, including more recent car models, leaving folks stranded where they are, forced to make do and live off the grid. Stuck in an isolated community with few neighbors, Jane is both frightened at the unexplained change in their fortunes as well as resentful at being thrust into a position where she must labor for strangers while dealing with her own unresolved issues with her grandmother and her past.
If you're looking for an action-packed tale or tons of gore, this one is not for you. It is instead a quiet and elegiac examination of one woman's psyche and her tentative attempts to unravel the secrets surrounding her even though she's terrified of what she might discover. The other characters in her new community are sharply drawn and intriguing, and her love/hate relationship with her enigmatic grandmother relatable. While there are many weird and startling events, we mostly follow Jane as she tries to get used to her new responsibilities and accept the fact that her old life is over.
There is a profound loveliness to be found here in this juxtaposition between the mundane and even boring business of surviving and the eerie mysteries that permeate the landscape, dwellings, and people Jane encounters. I won't spoil the surprise of what is in the cellar beneath the cellar, as the buildup to the reveal is a big part of the enjoyment of this tale, but suffice to say there is unforgettable imagery and beautifully evocative language used to describe it. Recommended for fans of slice-of-life, elegantly melancholic horror that builds on folk, Gothic, and cosmic elements to form a portrait of one woman's struggle to come into a power that she both longs for and fears.
If you're looking for an action-packed tale or tons of gore, this one is not for you. It is instead a quiet and elegiac examination of one woman's psyche and her tentative attempts to unravel the secrets surrounding her even though she's terrified of what she might discover. The other characters in her new community are sharply drawn and intriguing, and her love/hate relationship with her enigmatic grandmother relatable. While there are many weird and startling events, we mostly follow Jane as she tries to get used to her new responsibilities and accept the fact that her old life is over.
There is a profound loveliness to be found here in this juxtaposition between the mundane and even boring business of surviving and the eerie mysteries that permeate the landscape, dwellings, and people Jane encounters. I won't spoil the surprise of what is in the cellar beneath the cellar, as the buildup to the reveal is a big part of the enjoyment of this tale, but suffice to say there is unforgettable imagery and beautifully evocative language used to describe it. Recommended for fans of slice-of-life, elegantly melancholic horror that builds on folk, Gothic, and cosmic elements to form a portrait of one woman's struggle to come into a power that she both longs for and fears.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Ooof. This one was rough. Like… Grasshands rough. The concept was sooo good, but the execution? Absolutely not.
The Cellar Below the Cellar follows Jane, who stops by her grandmother’s house in the woods and ends up stranded there when a massive solar storm wipes out the power grid. With no way to contact the outside world, she and Grandma check on the nearest neighbors and decide to pool resources to survive. Meanwhile, Grandma — who is so suspiciously obtuse and obviously keeping some secrets — keeps pushing Jane to take over as guardian of the cellar below the cellar. And Jane is terrified of whatever’s down there.
Sounds promising, right? Except the writing is… bad. Like, distractingly bad. Jane is supposed to be thirty-three, but she thinks, talks, and reacts like a sulky teenager. I genuinely assumed she was sixteen until the author casually dropped her age. She even plays dolls with the neighbor girl — dolls her late mother made, dolls with “special powers” like taking over your skin and doing your chores for you if you feed and water them. I wish I were joking.
Grandma is hiding something, everyone is acting weird, and the writing is painfully clunky. Honestly, this should’ve been a DNF, but I kept going because I needed to know what was in the cellar below the cellar. And by the time we finally got there, there weren't that many more pages to go so...
This is absolutely landing on my Worst Of 2026 list. And that sucks, because I had such high hopes. And seriously... with a cover that gorgeous, the book had no business being this bad.
Books like this make me wonder if I should create a "books I suffered through so you don't have to" goodreads shelf.
The Cellar Below the Cellar follows Jane, who stops by her grandmother’s house in the woods and ends up stranded there when a massive solar storm wipes out the power grid. With no way to contact the outside world, she and Grandma check on the nearest neighbors and decide to pool resources to survive. Meanwhile, Grandma — who is so suspiciously obtuse and obviously keeping some secrets — keeps pushing Jane to take over as guardian of the cellar below the cellar. And Jane is terrified of whatever’s down there.
Sounds promising, right? Except the writing is… bad. Like, distractingly bad. Jane is supposed to be thirty-three, but she thinks, talks, and reacts like a sulky teenager. I genuinely assumed she was sixteen until the author casually dropped her age. She even plays dolls with the neighbor girl — dolls her late mother made, dolls with “special powers” like taking over your skin and doing your chores for you if you feed and water them. I wish I were joking.
Grandma is hiding something, everyone is acting weird, and the writing is painfully clunky. Honestly, this should’ve been a DNF, but I kept going because I needed to know what was in the cellar below the cellar. And by the time we finally got there, there weren't that many more pages to go so...
This is absolutely landing on my Worst Of 2026 list. And that sucks, because I had such high hopes. And seriously... with a cover that gorgeous, the book had no business being this bad.
Books like this make me wonder if I should create a "books I suffered through so you don't have to" goodreads shelf.
March 30, 2026
🌙𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙧 𝘽𝙚𝙡𝙤𝙬 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙧 // 𝘐𝘷𝘺 𝘎𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴
If folk horror is your jam, this book needs to be in your hands right now! It’s dark, full of dread, shrouded in mystery, and all wrapped up in this absolutely beautiful cover! (I’m a sucker for a stunning book cover.)
…𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵? ⬇️
After being stranded at her grandmother’s house in the woods during an unprecedented solar storm that fries all electronics, Jane must find her place in the off-grid, isolated community surrounded by strange neighbors and secrets. Whatever is hiding in the cellar below the cellar may just hold the key to Jane realizing her own identify and power.
💭…𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴? ⬇️
Right from the start I got some (modern) Grimm’s fairy tale vibes…you know the kind of story that seems whimsical and folkloric but also has a tinge of danger and darkness lurking in the background. I guess this makes sense seeing as the story was inspired by Russian and Alpine folklore and pagan mythology.
I do love a good coming-of-age story, but I don’t ever remember reading an adult version of this trope. Jane really does grow as a person, trying to live in the now while also confronting what lurks in her past. A story that goes beyond surface level is always welcomed on my shelves.
I don’t know exactly how to describe how this one left me feeling…cozy, unsettled, hypnotic, and wary are all words that come to the forefront of my mind.
🖤🖤🖤🖤/5
💫 Thank you @apexbookcompany @violetlichenbooks and grimivys for this quite peculiar novella.
If folk horror is your jam, this book needs to be in your hands right now! It’s dark, full of dread, shrouded in mystery, and all wrapped up in this absolutely beautiful cover! (I’m a sucker for a stunning book cover.)
…𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵? ⬇️
After being stranded at her grandmother’s house in the woods during an unprecedented solar storm that fries all electronics, Jane must find her place in the off-grid, isolated community surrounded by strange neighbors and secrets. Whatever is hiding in the cellar below the cellar may just hold the key to Jane realizing her own identify and power.
💭…𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴? ⬇️
Right from the start I got some (modern) Grimm’s fairy tale vibes…you know the kind of story that seems whimsical and folkloric but also has a tinge of danger and darkness lurking in the background. I guess this makes sense seeing as the story was inspired by Russian and Alpine folklore and pagan mythology.
I do love a good coming-of-age story, but I don’t ever remember reading an adult version of this trope. Jane really does grow as a person, trying to live in the now while also confronting what lurks in her past. A story that goes beyond surface level is always welcomed on my shelves.
I don’t know exactly how to describe how this one left me feeling…cozy, unsettled, hypnotic, and wary are all words that come to the forefront of my mind.
🖤🖤🖤🖤/5
💫 Thank you @apexbookcompany @violetlichenbooks and grimivys for this quite peculiar novella.
Review of advance copy
Beautiful atmosphere with a lingering dread.
The Cellar Below the Cellar: A Folk Horror Novella suspends the reader in a dreamy, rustic apocalypse of sorts. The characters must navigate a perplexing world within a world of unfolding mysteries under the haunting glow of an ever-present aurora.
The author’s unique brand of unquiet horror truly shines in this liminal tale of survival, with a fascinating blend of comfort and discomfort present throughout – as if the reader were wrapped in the coziest of blankets, teetering on the edge of some frigid void.
I loved the dynamic between the main character, Jane, and the peculiar cast of supporting characters, some of which are quite surreal. Jane’s Delphic grandmother was a particular standout, But there is so much more to discover!
Between the pages exists a curious world that is floating away inside of an eerie bubble, and across its membrane flow the questions of a mysterious nether realm. The Cellar Below the Cellar will leave you calmly unsettled, provoking many thoughts along the way.
The Cellar Below the Cellar: A Folk Horror Novella suspends the reader in a dreamy, rustic apocalypse of sorts. The characters must navigate a perplexing world within a world of unfolding mysteries under the haunting glow of an ever-present aurora.
The author’s unique brand of unquiet horror truly shines in this liminal tale of survival, with a fascinating blend of comfort and discomfort present throughout – as if the reader were wrapped in the coziest of blankets, teetering on the edge of some frigid void.
I loved the dynamic between the main character, Jane, and the peculiar cast of supporting characters, some of which are quite surreal. Jane’s Delphic grandmother was a particular standout, But there is so much more to discover!
Between the pages exists a curious world that is floating away inside of an eerie bubble, and across its membrane flow the questions of a mysterious nether realm. The Cellar Below the Cellar will leave you calmly unsettled, provoking many thoughts along the way.
Review of advance copy received from Author
This is the third book by Ivy I've read after Glass Stories and Star Shapes, and she continues to subvert my expectations. The narrator of The Cellar Below the Cellar, Jane, is a kind of typical whiny millennial, and Ivy does such a good job of drawing this character who comes off as very petulant and self-centered (even when other people around her are worse). At first it seemed like the narrative was headed in a very similar direction to Star Shapes, but in takes an unexpected turn. Whereas Star Shapes had a sinister ending, the fantastique elements in Cellar are more hopeful, and we see the narrator develop into a strong and morally respectable young woman. One thing Ivy excels at here is not revealing too much. We don't get a lot of flowery descriptions of the supernatural, and aside from being told that Jane's mother killed herself, it doesn't go into anymore detail. What could easily have become cliched doesn't because of these omissions. Overall, this packs a wonderful emotional wallop, and is filled with heart-rending sentiment while never being sentimental.
A big thanks to Ivy for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
A big thanks to Ivy for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Brilliant.
Grimes's extraordinary tonal mastery is evident here from the very first sentence: the apocalyptic opening clause, the almost petty relationship drama middle, and then the deadpan absurdity of the final phrase.
I tire very quickly of marketing categories, but the subtitle "A Folk Horror Novella" is appropriate. THE CELLAR BELOW THE CELLAR is not the work of someone who saw MIDSOMMAR and thought it was "a vibe". It is the work of an artist truly engaged with oral storytelling traditions.
It's also the first of Ivy's works in which I feel I can detect particular literary influences: O'Connor, Brautigan, Shirley Jackson—by contrast, GLASS STORIES reads like something that simply appeared from another world—but this does not diminish the originality of her vision one jot.
The voice is conversational in a way that is never precious; Jane is never the kind of forced-quirky narrator who so often shows up to annoy me these days, but an authentic character.
This is the real thing: weird fiction that's actually weird. Not a redundant tentacle in sight.
I've said it before and I say it now: Ivy Grimes is the one of the most—quite possibly the very most—singular young talents in the field today.
Grimes's extraordinary tonal mastery is evident here from the very first sentence: the apocalyptic opening clause, the almost petty relationship drama middle, and then the deadpan absurdity of the final phrase.
I tire very quickly of marketing categories, but the subtitle "A Folk Horror Novella" is appropriate. THE CELLAR BELOW THE CELLAR is not the work of someone who saw MIDSOMMAR and thought it was "a vibe". It is the work of an artist truly engaged with oral storytelling traditions.
It's also the first of Ivy's works in which I feel I can detect particular literary influences: O'Connor, Brautigan, Shirley Jackson—by contrast, GLASS STORIES reads like something that simply appeared from another world—but this does not diminish the originality of her vision one jot.
The voice is conversational in a way that is never precious; Jane is never the kind of forced-quirky narrator who so often shows up to annoy me these days, but an authentic character.
This is the real thing: weird fiction that's actually weird. Not a redundant tentacle in sight.
I've said it before and I say it now: Ivy Grimes is the one of the most—quite possibly the very most—singular young talents in the field today.
April 2, 2026
Jane finds herself in a post-apocalyptic setting in which she is forced by her grandmother to help members of their isolated community work together for the good of the group. Also, her grandmother's house possesses a cellar below the cellar that Jane dares not enter despite her curiosity. Will she gain the courage to see what's inside? This is a weird little story that I mostly enjoyed, but I wish I had more understanding of the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" and mythical Frau Perchta both of which inspired this story as that may have helped make sense of things better.
Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Violet Lichen for the ARC!
Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Violet Lichen for the ARC!
May 3, 2026
Ivy Grimes has always been interested in dismantling fairy tales - peeling back the layers of myth and exposing the weird core. She's an empathic and subtle writer; one thing that happens with her stuff is she sweeps you along, like yeah, of course, sure, the other cellar, and then all of a sudden you're like wait, why is any of this? Why's that guy got a bunch of demons in jars? Why is this doll doing chores? Like it sneaks up on you, because both Grimes and her characters tend to take it all for granted.
This is her best and deepest work yet. I read it in a single day. It's brilliant stuff.
This is her best and deepest work yet. I read it in a single day. It's brilliant stuff.
April 9, 2026
I won this book in a StoryGraph giveaway (thank you!) in exchange for an honest review.
I read this in one sitting, and I loved being immersed in its world. I feel like I just woke up from a dream I am trying to remember. I am looking forward to seeking out the source material that inspired it.
The occasional turn of phrase just knocked me out.
Just marvelous.
I read this in one sitting, and I loved being immersed in its world. I feel like I just woke up from a dream I am trying to remember. I am looking forward to seeking out the source material that inspired it.
The occasional turn of phrase just knocked me out.
Demons are the mighty ribbons that will be untied at the end of the world.
I didn’t like to be the only source of light in a room.
Just marvelous.
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